Playing a game on the PC usually provides a better experience than the same game on a console, with a few exceptions (Diablo 3, I’m looking at you). Yet many people still enjoy consoles, and it’s easy to see why. PCs are more complex and lack standardized components, which means there’s no guarantee a game will run, or run well.

While random strangeness does at time occur, must of the problems encountered by PC gamers fall into some familiar categories. Issues can usually be resolved as long as the source isn’t a bug in the game’s code. Let’s have a look at the five most common problems.

Artifacts And Glitches

Artifacts, or glitches, are a species easily identified by a graphical weirdness. Game geometry may be missing, inflated, or mal-formed, textures might appear strangely pixellated or colored, and portions of the screen may flicker, suffer from banding, or otherwise just look odd.

Problems like this are usually the result of the video card fumbling the information sent to it by a game. Outdated drivers are sometimes the culprit, and if you often run beta drivers, that too may be the cause. A quick Google search regarding the game displaying such glitches may point you in the direction of others who can tell you what driver version works best.

Excessive Lag Online

You line up the shot. You squeeze the trigger…er, mouse button. For a second, nothing happens. Then your shot fires, hitting the wall your opponent was standing on just a moment before.

Online lag is a very frustrating problem that, at times, can seem difficult to deal with. The minimum amount of lag you can expect is dictated by the quality of your Internet connection, but most people on broadband receive 100-200ms to servers in the same region. More than that might indicate a problem.

Temporary Freezing / Hanging

Games are supposed to run more smoothly on the PC than on any competing platform, but that doesn’t always happen. Occasionally gamers run into a problem where a title seems to frequently freeze or hang, sometimes for several seconds at a time, before resuming normal play.

This is usually the result of a bottleneck in your computer’s performance. The hangs are caused by a sudden lack of resources, which forces the game to freeze while it waits for your computer to catch up.

Check to make sure that your computer’s RAM, video RAM, processor and hard drive meet the developer’s recommended specifications. If they do not, you may need to upgrade. If they do, download the latest video card drivers, clear out any unneeded background processes, and free up space on your hard drive (if less than 10% remains).

Screen Tearing

Tearing is a specific visual artifact that appears when the frames shown in a game seem to split into a top and bottom half, which do not align. In very severe cases, the split may even occur three or four times.

Unlike many other issues, this one is caused by too much performance. Most monitors have a 60 Hz refresh rate, which means that they only refresh their image 60 times a second. But a fast gaming PC can play many titles at much higher speeds. When the frames start to come in more quickly than the monitor can refresh, a refresh may contain information from multiple frames. And thus the problem.

Stuttering

This problem is different from freezing/hanging because it happens at a much higher frequency, and each individual “hang” lasts for a millisecond at most. The problem may not even be noticeable at first glance, but only apparent during fast movement.

Multi-GPU setups are the most common cause of stuttering. While they theoretically act as one, in practice they’re not always perfectly in sync. This may mean frames arrive in an uneven pattern, which leads to the stuttering effect.

The obvious way to fix this is to disable one of your video cards, but that’s not ideal. If you use Nvidia, try downloading the latest drivers, as the company has largely solved the stuttering. AMD has not had as much luck, so far, but you can try their beta drivers.

Conclusion

PC games are much more reliable than they used to be, and these issues (if they even occur) are nowhere near as severe as the crashes and driver conflicts that were common just a decade ago. If you’ve read these tips and still have a problem, feel free to leave a comment, or ask your fellow readers at MakeUseOf Answers.

When i am playing SuperCity neighbors ask you for items etc... when my window comes open with the request list it has what each person request out from their profile picture then aside from that there is a send optopn. When i click on the send it does nothing, will not send the item out, have had this problem for three weeks and even PlayKot cant seem to find the problem.

Since the MS anniversary update, my Steam Games won't, they start but always go of and steam keeps on trying to start the game. Or I get the message (like in Borderlands 2), that game was moved or possibly corrupted, which neither is the case. Rebooting my laptop (I7 3860, 6 GB Ram, Nvidia GT 740M (4Gb) and reinstalling the game doesn't help. It seems that the "security" update is more like HELL update. will use System Restore like before and wait 2 to 3 months, until MS has solved those issues.

but still my pc is acting like i3 processor and the game is not running smoothly,even though my system configerations are high end.The game which i m facing problem with is "LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER".and also my system configerations are more than enough for this game.plz help.......

I have : core i7 920 @ 4Ghz , HD5970 4GB Black, 12GB DDR3 Ram 1200Mhz.
I still cant play the witcher 2 without dropping the graphics to "crap" . Is there any fix to this as the witcher 3 is coming and I want to complete the second one and will not be buying the third one if I cant even finish the second with atleast descent graphics.

Besides what Tom W said, sometimes you'll have to switch Internet providers to see ping improvements. Simply switching isn't a guarantee that pings will improve -- you'll need to do some research to see if others notice an improvement with that specific provider.